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Table of contents:

• What's new
• AMF Overview
• Installation
  • Check List
  • Installing AMFPHP
  • First Service
  • AMFEXT
  • Gateway.php
• Service Browser
  • Installation
  • Security
• Fundamentals
  • Security
  • Datatypes
  • Class Mapping
  • Sessions
• Creating Services
  • Getting Started
• Debugging
• Debugging primer
• PHP error logs
• Debugging proxies
  
• Tutorials
  • Strings
  • Arrays
  • Datagrid
  • Date/Time
  • Blob
  • VO's
• AMFPHP Development
  • Development Roadmap
  • SVN Access

What is it?

AMF (Action Message Format). AMF is what Flex and Flash Remoting use to talk to the back-end server (Java, ColdFusion, PHP, etc.). It provides serialzation of Action Script Objects native types and objects to be sent to the server where they are unserialized into the server languages data type. The serialization process is 100% binary in its transmission over port 80/443. As of AMF3 the data is also compressed for faster transmission.

NetConnection in the Flash Player

Flash Player 9 has native support for NetConnection in the Flash.net package which provides everything necessary for AMF communication. This means that there is no longer a need to download and install Flash remoting classes or components. It also means that every Flash Player now has the encoding and decoding nativly supported and does not require additional code to be downloaded.

Flex

Flex2 has a package built on top of Flash.net.NetConnection called RemoteObject. RemoteObject gives you several helper functions that make development of large AMF applications much easier than using the native NetCOnnection. RemoteObject has a concurrency property that makes larger applications much easier to build. It also has a ShowBusy cursor that you can use if the UI is useless unless it has updated data from the server.